David
by befree27
Summary: I was so intrigued by the character and idea of David. I felt there was a real story behind his "life" and existence. What if David were once human? What if he were the first in the evolution from man to machine? This is just a part of the story of how he evolved from David the man, into David the over-seeing Android of the Prometheus.
1. Chapter 1

David

All at once, the power in David's house failed. Darkness fell around him and he could almost feel the electricity leave the air, like someone pulled the plug on his life. He sat in the dark feeling like a little boy who had accidentally locked himself in his grandmother's old hutch, scared and unsure, hearing the latch catch with a deafening click. He felt like he was trapped in one of those stories where in the end, everything wasn't real. That it all turns out to be a dream or a coma or something like that. But he had a feeling this was much worse. That this time, reality was the horror.

He held his breath for just a moment before a bright red flashing filled his vision. He squinted and strained to get a closer look, but he couldn't raise his head. He heard a man's voice, "End simulation." Am I dead? Is that God, he wondered to himself? There were several flaws with that line of thought. First of all, he didn't believe in God. He had been an active Atheist since his first cell division in the womb. Openly mocking those who would talk about faith and God. Secondly, why would "God" say something as absurd and confusing as "End simulation?"

The dull ache behind David's eyes was quickly turning into a pulsing throb. The rhythm of his heartbeat behind his eyes was in synch with the red flash of light that was filling the room. He searched frantically for the source of it, but his head felt like a lead balloon on a toothpick, like his neck would snap under the weight. Beads of sweat were starting to trickle down the sides of his face soaking into the gray collar of his cotton t-shirt. He finally caught a glimpse of the culprit. Beneath the ceiling fan in his living room he could see a small glass dome containing a spinning aluminum disc inside that was reflecting the light in every direction causing a riot of red on the walls. It spun in mock silence the same way the lights of a police car would do once the culprit had been apprehended and cuffed, face resting on the grit of the pavement. He felt the irony of the thought seep through the cloud that was slowly forming around his brain. How did that get there? How long has it been there? David's eyes darted in all directions expecting to see a SWAT team crash through his windows or hear a bullhorn, but the eerie silence continued. After another thirty seconds of gut wrenching quiet, the same kind of quiet that surrounds you when you open your mouth and scream in a nightmare, but nothing comes out, the lights came back on with the sound of a resurgent crescendo. The red domed light continued its silent, mocking spin, but with much less intimidation now. And then an amplified voice filled the house.

"David, I'm so sorry, we'll make the pain stop very soon. You have officially been decommissioned. We were wondering how much longer they would delay the decision. It seemed very unorthodox, not that there is any protocol for this kind of thing."

At once, David recognized the voice booming through his home, but why would Dr. Anderson's voice be speaking to him over a PA system, and in his own home? His house didn't even have an ADT system, he thought to himself.

Six months before this moment, David awoke to a golden bath of light filling his bedroom. His eyes did not flutter they just simply opened. There was no yawning or stretching. The window was partially open letting the warm breath of the day caress his body. Goose bumps broke out where the air had kissed his skin. For just a moment, he lay motionless soaking it all in, feeling each moment in its entirety. He took a breath and swung his legs over the side of his bed and looked behind him at the soft indentation where his wife slept. She was already up and about with their small daughter, Charlotte. David felt happiness and contentment fill him. This was how every morning began and there wasn't a time in the recent past that he could remember feeling sorrow.

David slid his feet into the brown slippers that were always patiently waiting for him beneath his bed. He stood up and made the short trek to the master suite bathroom where he glanced at himself in the mirror. His lightly sleep disheveled auburn hair was the perfect compliment to his piercing blue-green eyes. He had never been one to dote on himself, but today he took note of his strong jawbone and even skin tone. He smiled and revealed two rows of straight, even teeth. He clicked them together with a clack, clack, clack.

"Strong as ever." He said aloud.

Once David was finished making his usual morning bathroom rounds: brush teeth, tousle hair, evacuation of yesterday's meals; all of which happened at an abnormally regular interval, he pulled up his boxers and headed to the kitchen.

David's house was the picture of modernism meets quaint, country cottage. It was full of clean lines with rural touches like a mudroom and an old antique hutch that was passed down to his family from his great grandmother. David remembered being a young boy and getting in a considerable amount of trouble when he climbed inside the old double wooden doors below in a feeble effort to hide from bath time. He could remember sitting in the dark and the smell of the dirt on his skin mixing effortlessly with the old oak smell of the hutch. He had closed his eyes and imagined that he was crouched inside the giant trunk of one of the trees in the forest beyond his great grandmothers backyard, like a fox in a den with the smell of earth and warm wood surrounding him. His vision had been abruptly snatched from his mind as the doors of the old hutch flew open and his mother's arms raced in and pulled him out, half naked and muddied from head to toe. The trail of little brown footprints had done little in helping conceal his hiding place. A smile crossed David's face as the memory flooded his mind, nearly as vivid as the day that it had happened.

As he strode down the hall toward the kitchen, the sweet smell of pancake batter and warm syrup drew him closer, he glanced at the pictures hanging on the wall. There were family photos from many years of happy memories together. Pictures of Charlotte just weeks after she had been born, him and his wife on the beach in Maui on their honeymoon, and even a JCPenney photo session that featured the three of them in tacky Christmas sweaters with plush reindeer antlers comically poking out from each of their hair. That had been the photo that was included in the Christmas card they sent out that year with a detailed letter explaining the past several months in full. It had been a good year. One for the books, he would say. Charlotte had turned 4 and learned how to ride a bike, his wife Claudia had been accepted to NYU's Doctoral Program for Child Psychology, and he had received a promotion. He was now the Head of Scientific Research and Development for a company called Biomatch Life Systems. It was a company that specialized in the integration of biological or organic matter and synthetic technology. The idea was that when biological material, such as tissue, was fused with synthetic material, such as a prosthetic heart valve, both working together resulted in a hybrid organ that the human body could eventually grow into and integrate into the rest of the body. The sustainability was much, much greater. The result was something that lasted a hell of a lot longer and had a significantly lower failure rate than anything the human body could develop on its own. Sure, you could grow someone a new liver, but it was still in essence, no better than the one that had already failed. And if David were bragging, the word promotion really didn't do his position justice. The money was phenomenal, but more than that, he was changing the world, the world just didn't know it yet.

As he entered the kitchen, with hardly a limp in his step or a hunch in his back, or any of the aches that usually come with the territory of growing older, Charlotte jumped from her perch at the kitchen table and ran to wrap her arms around his legs.

"Daddy!" She exclaimed. "Want to see the pancake I made? It has a whip cream smile, chocolate chip eyes, and a strawberry nose!"

"Who ever got joy out of eating things that look like people?" He asked her slyly and with a wink as he snatched a chocolate chip from the pancake staring back at him. Charlotte simply called him silly and then deeply dipped her pointer finger into the grinning pancake's white, foamy smile.

"Good morning, honey." His wife said to him in her smooth as butter voice. "Do you recall what it was that I asked you to do last night? Under no circumstances should you forget because you always say you won't and yet somehow always managed to?" She continued to whisk the eggs, not shifting her gaze to meet his. He knew exactly what he had forgotten to do. Every Monday morning the trashcan must be sitting patiently on the sidewalk for the men in the big angry truck to come and munch it away. He had always had a problem remembering to do that on Sunday night before bed and always promised that he would not forget. Inevitably, he always did.

"Oh, Darling!" David proclaimed in a very over exaggerated and sing-song kind of way. He raced over to her, snatched the whisk out of her hand, plopped it into the bowl of liquid eggs, and grabbed her hands in his bringing her in to him in a very Fred Astaire kind of way. He turned her around and around as they gallivanted in a circle around the kitchen table all the while Charlotte clapped her hands rhythmically. He stopped just short of the full round back to the foamy bowl of eggs and dipped her backwards over his arm bringing his face very near hers.

"Darling, how can things as insignificant as trash matter, when there exists a love such as ours?" He was nose to nose with her, lips partially opened on the verge of a kiss. She parted her lips and let a soft exhale of hot breath wash over his cheek and in a very seductive, velvety voice said, "if you forget one more time, you'll be sleeping on the couch for a week." She pecked him lightly on the tip of the nose and swung back up to standing position.

"Who wants eggs with lots of melty cheese?" She yelled and smiled back at David, knowing full well he would forget again, but he would never be sleeping on the couch.

In David's rational mind, life could get no better than this. He couldn't remember a time when there had been struggle in his small family. In fact, he couldn't remember much before Charlotte was born. David shrugged and "all well," ran through his mind. Why waste such a beautiful morning trying to think of unhappy times anyhow? Still, some thoughts nudged at him in the very recesses of his mind. He quickly pushed them away.

As the day wore on, it seemed of no consequence to David that he never showered or dressed for work. In his brain, he knew that he was the Chief Research Scientist for Boimatch, but he worried little for his responsibilities there. It seemed almost irrelevant. He ate a beautiful breakfast with his family, played Candyland with Charlotte while she giggled in her Cinderella costume, and made love to his wife that night. He then drifted off into a dreamless sleep. No, it wasn't dreamless, but the dreams were not new. They were very familiar. More like memories really. They were memories from a distant time in his child hood, memories that seemed a million miles away.

This sort of behavior went on for weeks, months really, but the bills never came. No debt collectors were calling about outstanding balances. Summer never turned to fall and the leaves on the Sycamore tree outside the kitchen window never fell or turned. Yet David and his family went on eating breakfast every morning, playing board games in the afternoons, and reading bedtime stories at night. The longer this went on, the more dark David's dreams became. One night he woke up sweating and shaking but couldn't remember what he had dreamt. He also started to notice a certain slowness in his wife's movements. It was all very subtle and a person who didn't know her probably wouldn't have noticed at all. It was in the way she turned her wrist when she was flipping pancakes. It was just that, a turn, not so much of a flick like it usually was. She used to scoop up the half cooked batter and flick her wrist, landing the pancake gooey side down with a splat into the sizzling pan. Now it was more of a turn. She simply scooped up the batter, turned her wrist, and let the pancake fall back into the pan. The first time he saw this he couldn't stop himself from staring. He just kept staring the entire time she made breakfast until Claudia was waving her hands in front of his face like a person trying to flag down a passing car.

"David. Yoo hoo, David. Anyone alive in there?" She snapped her fingers at him. He immediately came back into focus.

"Claudia, sorry, I must have been in a daydream." He looked at her apologetically.

"Well, it must have been a good one cause you were gone, outta here!" She made an umpires gesture, shaking her fist with her thumb thrust toward the ceiling.

"Ya, it was. I was thinking of you in your wedding dress, skipping through the surf like you did in Maui on our…" he stopped. Claudia stared at him dumbfounded.

"David, are you ok?" He looked in her eyes. She really was beautiful. Then he vomited.

"Oh my God, David, are you alright? What's the matter? Was it the eggs?" Honestly, David wasn't really quite sure what it was. It may have been the eggs, but somehow he doubted it.

"No, no, I'm ok, really. I think I just ate too fast or something. I'll be alright, please hun, don't worry. I know how you always worry."

"I won't," she promised, "as long as you're sure."

"I'm sure."

That night, David dreamt of the old, antique hutch. He dreamt he was frantically searching for a place to hide from his mother's groping hands wanting to toss him into the tub of soapy water, but he couldn't see the hutch. He reached his hands out and stumbled forward like a person who had lost their sight in an instant might do. He touched the small porcelain knobs with his finger tips and opened what he thought were the doors. His body fell inside as darkness closed in around him. Once he was huddled, with his arms wrapped around his knees, he wondered if he really had found the hutch. There was no way to be sure because the smell of dirt and wood was absent. How could he even be sure that it was his mother that was seeking him out? All at once, he began to cry. Warm tears made little clean trails down his dirt covered cheeks. The sound of his crying was the only tangible thing around him. He couldn't see the grain in the wood, he couldn't smell the musk of the dirt on his body, but he could hear the crying, sharp and distinct. He awoke. He was sweating again and his cheeks were moist with tears.

As the days wore on, his family began to fall apart. His dreams worsened to the point where they were merely muddled sounds and groping in the dark, but they always ended in him waking sweat covered and shaking. Most of the time his pillow was wet with tears. His wife shuffled around the house. She still made breakfast every morning, but with no enthusiasm. Zombie like in movement. His daughter, his poor little daughter Charlotte, slept most of the day. He tried to wake her once for a game of Chutes and Ladders, but all she did was roll over and tuck the blanket more firmly around her body. He touched her skin. She was cold. David himself was not on the up and up. He felt numb all over, like there was no blood flow in his body. He bent his knees to sit on the couch and nearly fell backward. He cupped his head in his hands and closed his eyes. It felt like he had a skull full of cotton.

David rolled his head to his left and could see his wife sitting at the kitchen table with her forehead resting on the hard wood surface. She had both feet planted on the floor and her arms were stretched out on either side her face, her biceps touching each ear, palms to the ceiling. In between him and Claudia, Charlotte lay on the floor in the fetal position. Her hand was clasped around the soft, satin "frosting" of her pink princess blanket with the thumb of the same hand stuck squarely in her mouth. Her breath came short, shallow, and quick. He wanted desperately to go to her, but his body just would not allow it. What was happening to them? All at once he thought about the fact that he couldn't remember the last time he had felt the warmth of the sun on his face. When was the last time that he had been outside? He couldn't remember being in his lab and discussing current events with his colleagues. What were the current events anyhow? Aside from his day-to-day routine, all that David could seem to remember was the birth of his daughter, Charlotte. Everything after that seemed like a dream. Had it happened, had it not? She was 4 years old, almost 5. He thought he could see her taking a step, pointing at the sky, "bird," she said, but the more recent he tried to remember, the harder it was to see. He began to cry again. Silently. He had no energy for heaving sobs, which was what he felt inside him.

And there he was, listening to that impossible voice. His brain was in pain trying to make sense of what was happening to him and his family. "Dr. Anderson, is that you?" David asked, in a tired voice. "Please help me. Help my family. We are sick. Where are you?"

"Oh, don't worry, David. We are here to take care of you. You and your family have shown us a great deal. The knowledge you have provided us is invaluable. The client is sure to be pleased with the results."

David struggled, his ears drums pounding.

"You see, Mr. Coleman, our research, your research, will help us change the world. Yet, unfortunately for you, your time is up."

"What do you mean? I don't understand why you are in my home?"

"Oh, David. For such an intelligent and successful man, you are so naïve. You always were. How can you still not see what is right in front of you?"

"What do you mean? Please, my daughter is sick." David looked at Charlotte and saw her shallow breath quickening.

"Your daughter's time is nearly up. As is yours. And your wife's." Said Dr. Anderson in a mocking tone.


	2. Chapter 2

**David** could hardly believe what he was staring at. For years, he had been pouring himself into his research and here looking back at him, and on such plain letterhead, was the fruit of that labor. If it had come to him on a pure gold tablet, it wouldn't have done the message justice.

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY- MR. COLEMAN WILL BEGIN OVERSEEING THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT. PLEASE REMIT ALL FURTHER INQUIRIES REGARDING THESE MATTERS TO MS. TAYLOR FOR SCHEDULING ON BEHALF OF MR. COLEMAN. FOR QUESTIONS REGARDING THIS MATTER PLEASE CONTACT SR. VP ANDERSON.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOU COOPERATION

THE BIOMATCH LIFE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT TEAM

In other words, David had just been made the primary overseer of research and development of the largest bio-medical manufacturer in the free world. Not bad for a Tuesday before lunch. Of course, this meant immense changes for his family's lifestyle. Mandatory changes. Confidential changes. A company like Biomatch doesn't get ahead by making friends and often times, it's the person with the biggest hand in the pot that is on the firing line. Though David's hand may not in fact be the biggest one in the pot, it was an unwritten rule that the person who held the Head of Research position was used as the public face of the company. Keeping those in charge of pulling the real strings safe.

This may sound unsavory to most, but to David it sounded like bliss. He would be given a multi-million dollar bottom line to keep to, but no one controlling his decisions on how to spend it. As long as he was continually moving forward and in compliance with the technological agenda's held by the company, he was trusted to discover the advancements of technology freely. His plans would be discussed behind some very heavily bolted doors on a quarterly basis, but without much interim or interruption. For any serious scientist, this was the golden goose. Being free to discover, without limitations.

That was how Biomatch had always done it. They employed only the brightest people in the world and paid them to think up and develop the next billion dollar industry advancements. Each time a head researcher had a project, they needn't worry about how to go about testing and developing it. Regardless of the experiments that needed to be done, the red tape was always cut and the door was open. David had no idea who was in charge of the ethics red tape or how they always managed to get around it, but they did. Human testing was not a problem for Biomatch, and they never seemed left wanting for subjects.

He had never personally seen the experiments that went on upstairs, but there were always rumors. Supposedly the previous head developer had an affinity for gene splicing. The boys down in the mail room, who often had more information than some of the scientist's with red level clearance had due to their exposure to sensitive material, had once told him about an incident that occurred around a decade before David arrived. "Upstairs" was the term that was always used to describe the research labs, and "the boys upstairs," were the VP's. David never had the heart to tell them that the CFO was actually a woman.

Apparently, some kind of hybrid humanoid escaped from "upstairs" and fell through a laundry chute. They said that he was completely naked and that his skin was changing color rapidly, sometimes even becoming completely transparent in places. That he was screaming wildly and tearing and scratching at his own eyeballs until he ran full speed into an exposed piece of rebar that had been blocked off by caution tape. The basement level had been under construction because they were in the process of adding in a break room for the janitorial staff. They had said that once the man was still, his skin evened to normal and they were quickly ushered out of the premises by uniformed police officers.

Of course, the general consensus was that the officers were in fact Biomatch employees merely playing dress-up in order to keep up appearances. All who had been involved in the incident that day had been debriefed and transferred to other Biomatch testing facility locations so as to minimize "employee anxiety." They didn't want their employees coming to work everyday having to face the sight of such a horrific accident. They were also told that the man was a researcher whose wife had left him for another employee and that he had come to the office high on hallucinogens with the intent of killing the man who had slept with his wife. This was, in effect, what had caused him to strip naked and claw at his own skin and ultimately commiting suicide. The full janitorial staff was relocated and a new one was in its place the very next day. Biomatch did not like delays.

David was never sure he believed the men in the mailroom. There were a lot of ex-cons down there. People with low education levels who took the job because Biomatch was part of the Federal Prison Reform program and gave ex-cons a chance to integrate back into society. They also had an unparalleled benefits package and starting pay for these types that no other company came close to comparing. Whenever Biomatch held a "Job Fair" when they opened a new facility, the lines stretched around the block several times just to get a chance to interview. The company was never short on personnel.

When it came to these situations, each one had a friend of a brother's ex-wife who worked at the Cincinnati plant who heard or saw something and funneled the story down the chain before it reached them. It was a very weak and lucid way to information, but if nothing else, it was often David's Friday lunch break entertainment.

* * *

**David** heard his front door unlatch. He forced his chin, which until now had been resting against his chest, up just enough to catch someone coming through his front door. The feet he saw had shiny black dress shoes covered in soft blue, puffy shoe covers, the kind that doctors always wear during surgery. Though this was an odd thing to see, this was not what concerned him the most. What concerned him was what he glimpsed beyond the man in the blue booties. Beyond his front door was not the front porch with the white banister and limp, potted spider plants that he remembered. Instead, what he saw was a dark metal wall roughly 20 feet past the threshold. There was the distinct glare of fluorescent lighting spilling in across his tile entryway. From what he could see, it looked almost as though his house were built in some kind of warehouse. Horror quickly over came him. Something was obviously very wrong here.

His chin fell back into its resting place against his chest. His eyes darted quickly back to the floor in front him. By now the blue booties had made their way all the way to where David sat, immobilized on the couch. They were standing directly in front of him and he could now see the small, embroidered "BMLS" on the top of the blue fabric. His mind searched its database. "BMLS," he thought over and over. Oh God. Biomatch Life Systems. It was the symbol of his employer that he was staring at.

"David, I know you can't look at me right now, but I want you to know that you shouldn't be afraid. You've lived a full life, so has your family because of us, of course. Soon you won't have any recollection of this moment. I guess I'm saying you should take solace in the fact that your family will never remember any of the pain."

Solace? That was definitely not the word David would use to describe what he was feeling. It was more like sheer, white knuckle terror. He knew the kind of things that Biomatch had had their hands in before. They were things that others might find terrible or immoral, but that he as a scientist knew were merely research. If a few had to suffer for the greater good, that was worth it. Wasn't it? Never once had he questioned that thought, until now.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone in a white lab coat scoop up a limp Charlotte and carry her out of the house. Her tiny hand opened and her pink, fuzzy blanket fell to the floor without a sound. Her head rolled to the side and that was when he saw it. There was a "port" behind her right ear. It was maybe only half an inch long and mere millimeters wide. How could he possibly have missed that? During bath time they always, always washed behind her ears. One time when Charlotte was a baby, they had a found a dried piece of macaroni and cheese stuck back there from lunch earlier that day. From then on it had been a running joke with his family to make sure to get all of the cheese from behind their ears. They use to tell Charlotte that if she didn't wash there, the field mice would come in at night and nibbler on her. Alas, David could not recall when he had bathed her recently, but surely he must have.

"Please," David pleaded, "I don't know what's going on Anderson, but leave Charlotte and Claudia out of this." David's words came out more like a slur of grotesque sounds. His tongue felt swollen and heavy. He felt something dripping down his chin and saw a puddle of white liquid pooling on his pants near his crotch.

"David, the work is already complete. The time for going back came and went years ago. And believe me, you wouldn't have wanted to anyway."

* * *

**Stacks** and stacks of forms was all that David could see covering the top of his new desk. He had a brand new office on the 47th floor of the Biomatch Life Systems main headquarters building. That was one floor below the top, as high as you could go without being a VP. He leaned back in his leather chair and closed his eyes. He could smell the fresh paint on the walls and he grinned. This was where all his hard work had led him. His family would never be found wanting as long as he was here. His daughter Charlotte was almost four years old now, and she would be in the best private schools money could buy.

The forms were formalities. The clearance process for the Head Researcher position was worse than the one for the CIA. They talked to your friends, your neighbors, your first grade teachers, even your dentist to find out the kind of person you were, to make sure that you were in fact honest with them about your ideals and beliefs. Around the inception of the company, they had had a researcher who had lied about their affiliation with a very prolific human rights group. Once they were in place, they had released all of the research animals and burnt down the west wing of the laboratory, effectively costing the company 5 million dollars in rebuilding costs. But more than that, Biomatch had been under intense media scrutiny after the man responsible for the incident took to telling them about the kind of tests that were run there. It took them years to finally fall off of the radar again. It was exactly this incident that led them to hire Head Researchers that were exclusively Atheists and with no special group affiliations. Also, they wanted to ensure you were the type of person who was willing to keep secrets, even from those closest to you. David didn't have issues with the idea of keeping secrets from Claudia. The benefit of doing so would be something even she couldn't deny. Also, he had worked his whole life for this opportunity. He wouldn't dream of doing anything to jeopardize it.

When David had first received the forms, he spent tireless hours reading over every piece of fine print. Due to the nature of the job, he wasn't permitted to hire a lawyer to help him with the forms. But after the third week of being in the Head Researcher position and still being unable to begin his research because the forms were incomplete, he just began signing and initialing. Some nights he would be at his desk, eleven thirty at night, eyes blinking shut and staying closed for just a fraction too long, on the verge of falling asleep face first on his brand new two hundred dollar, gold plated fountain pen- a gift from the company, of course. Aside from becoming fed up with the long nights of nothing but reading and signing, reading and signing, David was itching to get his lab set up. He could hardly sleep at night obsessing over every detail in his head. Even at the dinner table it was all he could talk about. Naturally Claudia was excited for him, but he could see the boredom in her face listening to him drone on and on, night after night about the same minute details of it.

David never really had been sure why a woman like Claudia had married him. David wasn't romantic. And he had never really wanted to be married, but when Claudia came into his life and it seemed to him that she might actually accept a proposal, he had gone ahead with it. Marriage was in line with normality, and David liked the illusion of "normal."

David wasn't necessarily normal, but he had spent his life perfecting the common idea of it. David had been raised by nannies. Both of his parents were scientists as well. They were never married and he was the result of a one-night-stand after a night a celebration. His parent's had worked together on the first legal human cloning project. His grandmother had talked his mother into not terminating the pregnancy because she knew that this accidental child was the only chance she was going to have at a grandchild. His mother was pure research. She had no desire for anything in her life other than her work.

David's grandmother had raised him until he was four years old. She loved him tirelessly. She doted on him constantly. David's mother was never there during the trips to the zoo or for his doctor's appointments, but he never really minded because his grandmother was all he needed. Then, just three months before David's fifth birthday, his grandmother had had a massive heart attack during the middle of the night. David found her the next morning clutching her chest with her head tilted to the side. As David stood there looking at her, her looking back at him with an empty stare, David knew there was no God. He felt no peace for his grandmother; he didn't feel her standing by his side. He felt nothing. He felt an entire universe full of emptiness. She had left him there, all alone and he resented her for it. Three months, one week, and two days before his fifth birthday was last day that David experience anything that felt like love.

The very next day, a woman he had never met was in his home cooking his meals, bathing him, and laying out his clothes with almost robotic like precision. She never hugged him or read to him. She was there simply to see that his basic human needs were met. Neither he, nor anyone responsible for him, ever considered that love was a basic human need.


End file.
